7im wrote:Any developer worth their salt would have a few copies of already completed WUs copied prior to completion and stored away to play with and wouldn't be damaging the project like this by downloading and aborting live work units.

Which is a sentiment I happen to agree with, except for the fact that I don't yet have any completed WUs copied prior to completion and I am loath to simply try to download an active WU for development purposes, hence my request for a copy of a not-completed ati_r700 GPGPU WU.

Running a VM on my Linux host is not a realistic option since the host is a PIII with 384MB of RAM... getting a VM to run at all would be a "challenge" for that environment. Thus the only other option open to me if no-one can provide me with a WU copy (which I will not return to Stanford, since it is a copy of someone else's active WU and in any case it would probably be well past the "deadline" date before the development work is completed) is to trash my Linux box , install a Windows OS, download an active WU, copy it somewhere safe, trash the Windows install and re-install Linux. Two big problems with that:

1. My Linux box is running real nice and happily working on FAH "classic" WUs, as well as doing my LAN backups as well as serving as a BitTorrent seed for things like linux .iso distros (share and share alike ). The adage "never touch a running system" could be extended to "never trash a running system".

2. I really don't like the idea of downloading an active WU and then hijacking it for dev purposes. Of course, I suppose I could download it, copy it, let it run to completion so it becomes a real "WU", but the problem with doing that takes me back to point (1)

So right now, am ready/willing/able to take a look at an ATI / CAL wrapper for WINE (I have some experience there: I write cuda and OpenCL code commercially for both Windows and Linux OS, not so much ATI Stream SDK, but I am also familiar with it) but am stuck at ground zero without a WU to use for development. Maybe I'll think of something in the meantime, or maybe I'll just get crazy enough to actually try a VM of Windows on a PIII / 384MB RAM Linux host...

kromberg wrote:So is there any way to run an ATI GPU client via wine or natively for linux?

Not that I currently know of. Well, that is if you are talking exclusively of F@H. On the other hand, I do know of other folding-style projects that will run natively on Linux and will run on ATI and nVidia cards on Linux natively. One such is the Help Conquer Cancer (HCC) project running under BOINC/World Community Grid (WCG), with whom I have recently been in touch. Their project WUs for native ATI and nVidia GPU on Linux are currently undergoing 3rd party (i.e. WCG) approval so all being well should be released fairly soon. No final ETA as of yet, however.

I have the combination of ATI GPGPU card on an old Pentium III - only ATI will run with a PIII since they require SSE support from host (nVidia GPGPU cards require SSE2 as minimum which PIII doesn't offer). RIght now I'm running "classic" client F@H on my PIII since running ATI on Linux for F@H just isn't there - but I know I'll be switching to ATI GPGPU projects native on Linux just as soon as they come along. The HCC projects seems to cover the GPGPU space that is not covered by F@H, forming together a complementary coverage of the GPGPU space on both Windows and Linux as native applications. So, yeah, I agree putting a GPGPU card into an old PIII system is like putting rocket boosters on a bicycle, but hey... isn't that all part of the fun?

kromberg wrote:One of my NVidia cards got RMAed with an ATI POS.

You mean you tried to run nVidia and ATI GPGPU hardware at the same time? The ATI cards seem to be a lot fussier about getting "first place" in the PCI slot. I tried the combi a few times, under Win32/XP it must be said, but the end result was always the same: it ended in tears. Well, BSOD and some corrupted filesystem entries on the next reboot, which I suppose is the nearest thing a PC can get to crying

herbak wrote:Not that I currently know of. Well, that is if you are talking exclusively of F@H. On the other hand, I do know of other folding-style projects that will run natively on Linux and will run on ATI and nVidia cards on Linux natively. One such is the Help Conquer Cancer (HCC) project running under BOINC/World Community Grid (WCG), with whom I have recently been in touch. Their project WUs for native ATI and nVidia GPU on Linux are currently undergoing 3rd party (i.e. WCG) approval so all being well should be released fairly soon. No final ETA as of yet, however.

Come on, guys. What kind of a scam are you running here. You were asked about running a client on ATI on Native Linux. You say it runs now and then you qualify it by saying it's "fairly soon." I can say that FAH will have an OpenCL client "fairly soon" and I don't need to sell folks on leaving FAH for some other project. We all understand that a future client is not a present client. The software industry is full of BS claims about future products.

codysluder wrote:You say it runs now and then you qualify it by saying it's "fairly soon."

HCC is already running public and has been for a long time, non-GPGPU. Simple internet search may help you there.The new GPGPU code is also running, just not through final -public - release, as I said.Maybe I'm missing something, but I fail to see where your problem is with those statements.

This topic is about a user-supported shell that can provide an interface between the FAH Windows client which does support the Brook+ version for ATI and the calls to ATI's Linux drivers. (A similar shell has already been developed for nvidia-CUDA.) I don't see how knowing about HCC facilitates either the development of such a shell or the development of a native client.

FAH is already running a public client for the CPU and has been doing so for over 10 years, so if that's what you want to talk about, nobody on this forum needs to know about HCC.

FAH has had GPGPU code running for a long time, too, but not in Linux. The plans to develop a fully supported V7 client and to develop an OpenCL core were announced by FAH quite some time ago. That software is not currently available to the public. I'm also assuming that there is dependable OpenCL support in the drivers on Linux/Windows/MacOS for your hardware, though that assumption is not necessarily true. I'm certain that both are currently running in the lab (if only to help debug the OpenCL support software) but FAH never announces expected dates of upcoming final releases, nor do they announce the progress being made during pre-release testing. They also do not publish data on the (sorry) state of OpenCL support from vendor X or Y.

Why not? Because announcements of that sort are unreliable throughout the entire software industry and explicitly blaming the lack of progress on X or Y or Z would be interpreted as slamming vendor X or Y or Z. When you are able to attest that there is a released GPGPU version of HCC, I will have no problem with your saying so, but right now there is no such capability.

codysluder wrote:but FAH never announces expected dates of upcoming final releases, nor do they announce the progress being made during pre-release testing

Sure, I was already aware of the policy but thanks anyway... As I'm neither officially FAH nor HCC, then I don't have a release policy. As a folding user, I thought I would simply share what knowledge I have, which I thought was partly the point of a forum.

codysluder wrote:When you are able to attest that there is a released GPGPU version of HCC, I will have no problem with your saying so.

Sure.Question was: "is there any way to run ATI client either natively or via wine", which I answered, sadly negatively, in the first sentence of my original reply. Since I happen to know of other ATI native clients on Linux, then I thought I would share the information I have which is the same subject matter that the original poster asked about. If you don't want to know then you don't have to read it and you don't need to shoot the messenger.

codysluder wrote:but right now there is no such capability

Well, not true - just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean it isn't there I guess I've already said enough times what the current state of play is so won't repeat it again. If I tell you up-front that there is a train coming towards you, you can do one of two things with the information: either be pro-active and use the information to act appropriately or be reactive and wait until it hits you...

AtwaterFS wrote:The only scams currently going on are ATI's support for Linux, and F@H's support for ATI... and also RMA'ing a Nvidia card and getting an ATI card back, that sounds like a scam too.

Not a scam, just poor business practices. I will never buy a XFX card again. They said that a ATI 5830 was the only card they card that compared to the 9800 GTX2 I sent in. I have been trying to work with them on getting another Nvidia based card like a GTX 270, a GTX 260, or even two 9800 GTX, but progress is slow and poor at best.

herbak wrote:Well, not true - just because you can't see it, it doesn't mean it isn't there I guess I've already said enough times what the current state of play is so won't repeat it again. If I tell you up-front that there is a train coming towards you, you can do one of two things with the information: either be pro-active and use the information to act appropriately or be reactive and wait until it hits you...

I almost fell out of my chair laughing.. ATI's compute and OpenCL support on Linux is junk.. It's *REALLY* in a "sad" state.. I was playing around with it and came to the sad conclusion that it's quite broken and AMD doesn't really care. The compute framework on Linux is so bad that Adobe completely stepped right over it and went with VDAPU for their multimedia accelerated HD playback in their new Flash player.. I think that says something.. I also think the fact that nvidia specifically invited ATI to use VDAPU also for multimedia accelerations several years ago on Linux and that ATI specifically refused to do so also says something. Also considering that Adobe was able to playback HD content with less than 1% CPU usage through Flash also says something about the power of VDAPU.. If this Linux compute train for AMD/ATI hardware is coming, let me tell you that AMD/ATI certainly isn't the ones who are onboard with it..

I think it will still be a couple years at LEAST before AMD takes compute seriously on Linux (ie: Delivers a framework that isn't broken).. ATI hasn't even delivered a decent multimedia framework to Linux, let alone a compute framework for science on Linux..

Windows on the other hand, is a completely different story for ATI hardware. It's looking better everyday. AMD/ATI has got a solid multimedia framework with DirectDraw/Directshow filters and such that plug into every Windows multimedia player out there.. Too bad they weren't able to do the same thing for Linux. VDAPU support is built into just about every Multimedia playback application on Linux now, and ATI's multimedia accelerations are not and there's nobody to blame but ATI/AMD for that.

Trying to do anything with ATI's compute framework on Linux right now is like walking through a minefield.. Stuff is broken everywhere, things aren't doing what they're documented to do, and stuff that isn't documented is getting missed because nobody knows about it... It's just meh.. I'm staying clear away from ATI/AMD's compute on Linux, it's quite clear that all they're focused on is Windows for the time being when it comes to OpenCL/compute/multimedia acceleration frameworks/AVIVO/etc. etc... Meanwhile, nvidia's PureVideo / VDAPU is looking pretty decent now that it has a major company like Adobe behind it agreeing that it is the way to go.. CUDA is also looking strong enough that nvidia is building their OpenCL framework on top of it.. Not that I would touch nvidia's OpenCL framework on Linux with a 10 foot pole though.

I know that Stanford and the groups working on the compute part of folding@home are already working on an OpenCL client which will run on both ATI and nvidia hardware which will also (theoretically) mean native support for both Linux and Windows (assuming all these broken frameworks get fixed, of course).. So you can say native support for FAH on Linux with ATI hardware "exists" but it's not "ready", same as you say above. In fact, I'd bet you a dollar that both groups are waiting on the same problems in the frameworks to get fixed before they release their clients..

I'm much more afraid of the situation where AMD/ATI releases OpenCL drivers/frameworks for Windows that works well and then neglect Linux.. That could be a real problem.. nvidia has already shown that they will focus on both Windows and Linux simultaneously and the delayed (but very functional) CUDA frameworks for linux shows that..

ATI/AMD has shown that Multimedia / compute accelerations on Linux is something they haven't taken very seriously. Where's AMD/ATI's Linux competition to CUDA? It's incomplete and "broken" in it's current state.. Where's AMD/ATI's Linux competition to VDAPU? It's not worth the effort to work with, just ask Adobe..

A little merriment will do you the world of good, glad to be of service Well, I finally got a few minutes to kill and picked up the notices about new posts in my inbox so thought I'd finally take a look.

Sidicas wrote:ATI's compute and OpenCL support on Linux is junk.. It's *REALLY* in a "sad" state.. I was playing around with it and came to the sad conclusion that it's quite broken and AMD doesn't really care.

Ok, then we have different experiences. I'm about to start cranking out my *3rd* commercial app on both Linux (both debian-based and redhat-based variants) and Windows (XP / Vista / 7), using OpenCL on nVidia and AMD. This time it's yet again an image classifier (for a hospital in case you were wondering, but I guess that's wandering a bit off topic...)FAH: well, they're looking at getting OpenMM (or some such named molecular framework stuff, name escapes me right now) GPGPU enabledHCC: they're doing pattern/image classifiers, also GPGPU enabled.Two worlds apart, in fact, joined only by the attempt to use GPGPU accelerators.

Sidicas wrote:So you can say native support for FAH on Linux with ATI hardware "exists" but it's not "ready", same as you say above. In fact, I'd bet you a dollar that both groups are waiting on the same problems in the frameworks to get fixed before they release their clients..

Worlds apart... and I'm not a betting kind of guy but thank you for the offer...Anyway; I hope you have a little more merriment this evening, if nothing else

They're packaged for nvidia, but there are other people who package ATI OpenCL libs on third party sites as I had no problems finding these.. The fact that OpenCL libs made it into Debian's stable repositories at all does say a lot about how far OpenCL has come in the past year. In fact open source developers are already writing their own OpenCL apps for everything under the sun (just check Sourceforge).

As far as the OpenCL ATI folding@home client, I've heard it's in the later stages of testing.. You can bet I'll be here trying to get it working under Linux like the rest of you when it does get released.

OpenMM is Stanford's own simulation framework -- similar to Gromacs, but adapted more as a toolkit rather than for stand-alone simulation. FAH's GPU3 core for Fermi uses that toolkit and runs it through NVIDIA's CUDA, fundamentally, OpenMM is already working. Creating a version of OpenMM that works through OpenCL has a lot in common with creating a version that works through CUDA, so it's reasonable to assume that's relatively close to completion.

I have no information regarding how OpenCL from ATI or from NVidia compare, nor do I know anything about how that support applies to Linux and/or Windows and/or MacOS-X. As you're pointing out, that could be a problem -- but I simply do not know.

FAH has announced that OpenCL will be supported in V7, the release of which is supposed to be in 1Q11 so it's expected this month. Stanford has traditionally limited their startups of things like OpenCL until they feel confident that one platform is working well before expanding to other platforms. I can't say whether that applies here or not. If OpenCL is working on OS A but not B, then they'll delay B. If OpenCL is working on hardware from vendor C but not vendor D, they'll delay support for vendor D so a lot depends on all that information I mentioned above that I don't know about. (In both cases, "working" means really working, not just working on specially designated test software.)

You're saying that ATI does not (yet) provide official OpenCL libraries for Linux. I expect that that will delay Stanford's statement of support and leave it to 3rd parties for the time being.